Animal rights vs. rodeo DMCA takedown fight settled

An organization representing rodeo cowboys has agreed to pay $25,000 to an …

In a settlement announced today, a rodeo association has agreed to pay the animal rights group SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness) $25,000 to resolve a lawsuit filed this summer in which SHARK accused the cowboys of abusing the takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to silence criticism.

Since late 2006, SHARK has been posting YouTube videos that the group believes show instances of rodeo animals being mistreated. That didn't sit well with the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, which had sanctioned several of the events caught on camera. The group sent YouTube a DMCA notice claiming that the videos infringed their copyrights, and the video streaming site promptly closed SHARK's account.

The only problem is that, as anyone familiar with copyright should know, you can't copyright facts—including live events. While PRCA can own copyrights in its own specific recordings of rodeos, the events themselves aren't copyrightable—which means recordings produced by SHARK members are owned by their creators. When SHARK's attorneys pointed this out, YouTube promptly reinstated the group's account.

SHARK didn't stop there, however. They thought the PRCA's copyright claim had been so clearly frivolous that it ran afoul of a DMCA provision making anyone who "knowingly materially misrepresents" a case of supposed infringement liable for "any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer." With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes abuse of the DMCA's takedown provisions to chill protected speech, they sued.

The cowboys apparently weren't in the mood for a showdown: pursuant to a settlement agreement (PDF) reached last week, the PRCA will fork over $25,000 to SHARK in exchange for their dropping the suit. They've also agreed that in the future, they'll take any copyright claims directly to a contact at SHARK rather than asking service providers like YouTube to pull down content—and in cases of disagreement, get their own attorneys to sign off on any DMCA action. Finally, PRCA will have to enforce any "no taping" policies at its events consistently—meaning they can't claim critics have violated the "contract" printed on rodeo tickets while allowing other attendees to record video.

The dispute resolution stipulations—which EFF's announcement describes as providing a "new model for handling takedown notices"—may actually be the most interesting aspect of the agreement. The DMCA is prone to abuse precisely because third-party providers are seldom in any position to evaluate the merits of asserted copyrights: they simply pull content, leaving the accused infringer with the burden of rebutting the claims in order to get their content restored. Now, though, PRCA has effectively agreed to try talking before resorting to censorship—at least when dealing with SHARK. The next, rather more difficult step, is getting other content owners to go the same route.